When approaching journalists to feature your startup in their next story, startup founders struggle a lot with how to approach the journalist. It is known that most journalists receive a lot of pitches from every other person. To stand out from the crowd, you need to approach your pitch very differently. The best way is to understand what your story is and what angle you will use to get a journalist interested.
Sometimes your startup might not be so world-changing, but your recent milestone could be. Sometimes it might not be promising a quantum computer but it’s helping solve flooding problems around the world. To get journalists interested about your startup, share the story using the following story angles;
1. A personal story
When preparing to approach a journalist whether by cold email or face-to-face interaction, choosing to share a more personal story can give you an upper hand from the beginning. Journalists love stories that can capture the minds of their readers. However, personal stories have to be real or people will see through the lies. For startup founders, the story about how you built your business from nothing can be very personal, but again to most journalists, very moving. That is why in the most recent times, personal stories by founders about how they started their companies with just $100 in their garages have become so common and yet, every similar story is still as moving as the first.
2. A new feature you’ve launched
New company features can at times be very big news. To gain maximum exposure from such news, it would be important to ensure the feature you’re launching isn’t just one of those features every competitor of yours has. It should be something unique. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes all you have to do is improve an existing feature in the market and launch it within your app or service. Journalists clamour for such news because they are looking for new and exclusive feature launches.
3. A milestone you have recently passed
Milestone stories can be very captivating. If you have managed to sign up a million users on your platform in the space of 6 months, that would be quite a story. The effect would trickle to other companies wanting you to document how you did it. Any journalist would be interested in knowing how the target was set, and how it was achieved. If you have managed to gain a thousand users in a week or two, there would be a journalist willing to know how you did it.
4. A story of how your company touches on societal issues
Does your story promise to impact on water shortage in dry areas around the world? Or do you have a better method of fighting cancer? Such societal problems need solutions and if your company has a concrete and proven way to help with this issues, the better it is for the world to hear about it.
5. A valuable resource that needs publicizing
If your company has done some incredible research of late about anything impressive, find a journalist to share the story with. People and companies love data, especially data based on facts. The research must be helping to answer very intriguing questions. You must also make clear your research methods, and if questionnaires were involved, attach in the report. Journalists would love such a story for the important questions it set out to answer and how it answered them.
6. A ground-breaking product
Do you have a product that you believe will change a particular industry forever? Getting published by a journalist wouldn’t be too hard. Take for example Uber, which has changed the taxi world. Another example would be AirBnb which has disrupted the hotel industry. Such stories are captivating, and will push your startup to heights of publicity you have never seen before. However, don’t claim your product is disruptive or ground-breaking if it’s just another copy of what the market is doing because no journalist will pick your story up.
For examples of these mentioned story angles, Pressfarm has done a very comprehensive write up of each of these story angles here.
Originally published at press.farm on March 20, 2017.
